A Mist of Grit and Splinters

by Graydon Saunders

  “Who is smarter than ‘they’re all one dot’.” Puddle’s the least provisional of the part-captains.

  Uniform Banner hasn’t got a provisional part-captain yet. Slow isn’t pleased with any of the possibilities. Promoting someone who showed up in this batch of recruits to part-captain’s steep, even when we’ve got some in their thirties with experience of life.

  “Who can keep track of sixteen points of view no matter what.” I get a bit grim. The standard can do that; the standard goes up to sixty-four, distinct and continuous. Maybe graul are made so as to find this useful. We’re not.

  That gets me a few nods, but not from Meek.

  “Twenty-five platoon sergeants,” Meek says. “Five sergeants-major.” That we do have. None of the sergeants-major are too steep by Wapentake custom, having been at least file-closers in the First. “You can have two or three.” ‘Tell me whose competence I must judge’ hangs there the way a javelin looks to float at the top of its arc.

  “Four-person observer teams times sixteen is eight files.” Make a calm gesture. Meek and I can’t get shouty anymore. Simpler and quicker just for us. “Won’t get that many.”

  That does get me a nod. ‘Observer’ asks a mental knack, it’s not talent, it’s detachment. Most haven’t.

  “One piper, one or two files of pipers. Not subject to a sergeant.” Meek’s stance expresses a belief I’ve said something pointlessly obvious.

  Couple of part-captains rock back a bit. The First has a piper, singular. The First sings, the First’s run memories of music from the Standard. Slow’s taking the elevation of spirits further.

  “Could be twenty files, there to come in with sticks.”

  It better expletive not be, but it might.

  “Piper, Observer, Colour-Sergeant.” Slow could be speaking to anyone.

  There’s times you can argue with Slow, and times you can’t. This is a can’t. All appointments are what some standard-captain made up.

  Meek looks straight at me. I can feel the decision not to ask about a plain sergeant, rather than asking the colour-sergeant to handle fifteen files themself. “You know what you’re doing?”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  D-Day Minus 803

  Year of Peace 544, Floréal, Fifth Day (Spring)

  Duckling

  Four/Twelve’s down to Westcreek Town. They do that, they march the West-East, sometimes they go north up the Blue. Never too far from Parliament.

  Westcreek Town makes moving paper easier.

  The best way, the Old Line way, is for all the paperwork to flow into the brigade; the signa eats it, replicates it to the standards that didn’t create it, and then an attached standard sends a banner off to the next brigade over with copies. March practice and no extra mass.

  The Second ain’t got spare banners. The Second ain’t official operational. The Second has wheelbarrows. The Second produces a surprising amount of paper by continuing to eat. Then there’s keeping track of everybody. The standard does that, but the copies have to move. So there’s me, a Colour Party file, and two wheelbarrows with paper where food ought to be. Up to Westcreek Town from the Edge is a long day, but we started early and we get lunch on the way. Parliament’s three days. It’d be a long two if there was a road from Westcreek Town to Hillroad Landing.

  Can’t put a battalion in the barracks, not in Westcreek Town. Crinoline’s Colour Party’s in the Gate House, neatly; it’s the old-style eight files the Gate House was built to hold. Most of Four/Twelve’s camped on the green. It’s a tight fit. Medics and stores and quartermaster and commissary in the East and West barracks buildings.

  Crinoline’s battalion clerks’ pile of paper’s in the back of the Captain’s House. Clerks not obviously present.

  Our pile of paper’s wrapped, not boxed. Saves weight at the cost of outside labels. Has to come off the wheelbarrows careful. Crinoline’s clerks have neat spots and signs for where everything goes. We leave it wrapped in its proper places. Last-time’s oilcloth and waxed canvas are nearly rolled up in a bin. The bin’s sign says “Wapentake, Second Heavy”. The other two bins say “Western Hills, Pennon” and “Wapentake, First Heavy”.

  Still sad I weren’t present the time Shadow appeared with the First’s paperwork.

  Crinoline’s quiet, and it’s their standard, so being latched don’t help. Still this waft of sun-warmed stone, ten or fifteen metres ahead.

  “Signaller.”

  “Sir.” Nobody who’s served in the First gets back into the habit of calling any appointed-captain “Captain”.

  “Come, lets us speak together,” Crinoline says, and it’s not a request. Don’t think there’s any particular disapproval. Crinoline’s sort of medium-eensy. Nobody’s ever going to suppose they ain’t adult.

  “Kenning, figure this takes a couple hours.”

  “Food, feet, rest,” Kenning says to me. No indication they think it’s a question.

  “Expect to return in the morning,” Crinoline says, generally. Then “Manoeuvre to cut their line of retreat,” to me specifically. It’s from the principles of engagement.

  “Sir!” comes from me and Kenning. We’ve got cots. No tent. No extra room, with the Fourth here. File-closer ought to be able to figure this out. Curious what Kenning’ll do.

  Crinoline’s got a set of Regular chairs added to the meeting room. I lift a me-sized chair off the stack against one wall. The Fourth’s reliable about swapping the Creek chairs back onto the floor when they move on. We’re reliable about the converse.

  “Somewhere in your reading list, Signaller, there’s three books about General Hammer.”

  “The biography, the official history, and the contextualizing retrospective from Three-Fifty-Nine.”

  Crinoline’s face does something. Don’t think it’s meant as a smile.

  “Yes.”

  “The biography’s fiction, the official history recounts what the Line would admit to believing around the Year Fifty, and the retrospective can’t bring itself to address the complete lack of primary sources.”

  “Complete lack?” Not angry.

  “The last claim of any communication with General Hammer happens in the Year Twenty. The accepted dates for Hammer’s command of the Line are from Thirteen Before the Peace to Year of the Peace Five. There’s claims for years from Six through Nineteen. Those are about as supportable as the claim for Five; someone wrote down what they say someone said at least a generation previously. The only living independent who could have met Hammer was Ongen, who didn’t. Ongen comes into Commonweal history sometime around the Year Thirty, despite having been a participant in creating the original Shape of Peace.”

  Careful breath.

  “There’s a standard described as Hammer’s in a standard-shrine in the City of Peace used by the Second Brigade. No one can latch to it and no enchanter is known to have examined it. The oldest binding-of-the-standards records accessible in the First Commonweal are from the Year of the Peace One-Seven-One. The oldest extant written record is from sometime around the Year Thirty. It’s one sentence recording someone unknown’s claim to have marched with Hammer in their youth. The Independents Wake and Crow separately report conversations between the years Thirty and Forty-Six with standard-captains who claimed to have served with General Hammer.”

  Crinoline’s got their head tipped over. Think it’s general inquiry. Could have some Regular meaning.

  “I don’t think Hammer didn’t exist, I don’t think Hammer was Laurel in disguise, I don’t think Hammer was a graul who went back to Laurel after doing what Laurel had commanded they do. I think the supposition that Hammer was an untutored considerable talent and died of it can’t be supported because we don’t even know what species General Hammer might have been.”

  “Yet you doubt the graul hypothesis?”

  “You serve with graul, you remember what they are.” Not the time for the story about Puddle. “Swearing never to speak of it’s not convincing across that time an
d those numbers.” Crinoline’s head tips different. I try to get the emphasis correct. “Not impossible; not convincing.” Half a shrug. “I ain’t convinced.”

  “Your understanding of Hammer’s historical role?” Crinoline’s doing the Old Line vaguely-cheerful officer voice.

  “In the Year Zero, having a Peace is doubtful. Nobody knows what that is. March and die’s got a long history. Keeping the Line distinct from the Peace’d be safer.”

  Not a smile.

  “Hammer decided sticking around was better for them, or their troops, than marching off in a hope of conquest would be. Hammer can’t have kept the Peace, not to begin with; Hammer advanced their understanding of Parliament’s objectives. What matters besides sticking is how completely Hammer obliterated any potential opposition. Anything organized submitted to Parliament entirely or — ” and I stop. There’s various glassy places today, one of them almost fifty kilometres long.

  Best single indication of Hammer’s untrained considerable talent. The multiplier works on whatever you bring to your latch.

  “Sometime around the Year Fifty, both the then-existing standard-captains talked one another into formalizing the Line’s relationship with the Peace. Peace was looking like it could work. They were getting old. Two standards wasn’t looking so capable anymore. They ascribed intent to Hammer; it gave them a plausible motivation to Parliament. It legitimized their decision to their troops.”

  Things were just getting organized enough around then to be formal about anything. Any history we have says the first couple generations of the Peace were wholly personal intention.

  “It’s unlikely, with what’s known from the independents and what’s known about those two standard-captains, that either of them knew or marched with Hammer. Hammer’s legacy got invented as the excuse the Line made up to anchor itself to the Peace.”

  “This does not much resemble the consensus position.” Can’t tell what Crinoline thinks of it.

  “Responsible for observers, sir. Report what’s there, not what’s expected.” Carefully don’t shrug. “Can’t require it if I can’t do it.” Won’t notice where the observers are going wrong.

  I get the impression of Captain Crinoline nodding. They don’t; no dip to their head. The sun-warmed-stone smell’s stronger. “Do you have similar views of the aphorisms?”

  “‘If there be any glory in war, let it rest on the Peace behind us’ requires us to suppose Hammer had a clear notion of the Peace, sir. Since the Line’s relationship to the Peace got regularized fifty years later and nobody then had what we’d call a clear notion today, I doubt Hammer said it quite like that. ‘Peace behind us’ means what we make it mean. Less trouble to acknowledge that.”

  “If Hammer was a considerable talent, they could have some sense of the future.” Same entirely neutral voice.

  “Not across five hundred years, sir. Not likely across five.” Gets me an inquisitive eyebrow. “Shadow drills sword-fighting with the Captain in the graul style, sir. Asked Shadow how it works. Further’s harder; Shadow went blank for a bit and said it wouldn’t hurt to think of it as a logarithmic curve with the vertical axis as future distance and the horizontal axis as the amount of Power required.”

  Inhale. “‘No justice through fear, no peace by killing, no virtue in dying’ isn’t recorded until sometime after Year of the Peace Two Hundred. Just when might depend on the dates for a diary where the diarist didn’t record dates with the entries.”

  Crinoline does nod, precisely and once.

  “The whole ‘I would that’ speech is about what the Line might want Hammer to have said. It uses words that didn’t exist or had other meanings in Hammer’s day. Someone made it up, and probably not until after the Turbulent Century. Before that, ‘comity’ wasn’t a word.”

  “Do you teach recruits these things?”

  “No sir.” Which ain’t the place to leave it. “If someone asks, I tell them it’s tradition. If someone does the research themself, I tell them it’s the Line’s Ur-law; Peace had never existed, so we had to make it up. If they’re fussy about it, I point out the Wapentake’s making itself up right now, active, not the way keeping tradition in a new time’s making yourself up. We’re keeping ‘Peace behind us’, but ‘Never stop’ and ‘You kill them by the each’ are new.” Inhale again. “Fire said ‘You kill them one at a time’; there’s forty living heard it and more who were dead, and it shifted.”

  Twitch’s been asked for the Standard of the Seventieth’s recollection of it three times now. The Captain’s forbidden further bets on the subject. Going to have to revise the Manual for Soldiers, and that goes in when we do.

  “How many have been fussy?”

  “Just one, sir. I expect to confirm them as Observer in the Second.”

  That’s an actual smile.

  Thread 3

  Slow’s memoirs

  In their youth, ophidiform graul resemble ancient placoderm fish. At the completion of their youth, they undergo a period in a condition the learnéd place between estivation and metamorphosis. During that period, they are entirely defenceless; insensate and immobile and cocooned under a depth of mud below still fresh water. I do not pretend to understand how the Captain found a group of estivating graul, but will note for the curious that the battle-standards of the present Commonweal retain from the design of Laurel’s originals the broad sensorium appropriate to graul. Those of us whose persons lack those senses cannot make much use of the full sensorium, but of course the Captain can.

  The presumption, natural enough, was that these were with some likelihood our graul; graul from the First Commonweal who had survived travel down the Main River and through the Dread River to the sea. This would be a surprising occurrence with unfortunate implications for the state of the First Commonweal, but such would be far less surprising than discovering that the Wizard Laurel had passed anywhere near either Commonweal would be.

  Estivation even under water is not safe if you are known or sought, and our hope of even scant news of the First Commonweal was great. So also is the Line’s obligation to distressed citizens great, those displaced (as we thought) by some assault from without the Commonweal. Uniform Company moved the estivating graul, pond and all, above the Edge.

  After the battle, these graul had been moved with less haste but no greater care to new habitable land between the Creeks armoury and the Galdor-gesith’s larhaus. This news came to me while I was in the hospital, as a courtesy to someone officially incapacitated but still then Thorn Company’s appointed commander. The estivating graul reposed there within a new lake fringed with a broad new marsh for near enough a year, from late spring into early, and woke as the ice broke above them.

  They were not our graul, and while all graul are in some narrow sense Laurel’s, these had no clear memory of anything before a torrent of water and the sea. It had been a long journey, and they had not all survived it. They had known in some instinctual way that the period of metamorphosis would come and could not be undertaken in salt water, and had pressed on until they found a river without signs of human habitation or distressing life.

  I was told just before I met them that a long sojourn in salt water explains the darker integument of these graul. That person, a clerk of the Peace-gesith, was in their origins from somewhere west of the City of Peace and familiar with graul. (So much so that they could speak the language graul learnt in Laurel’s service.) That clerk was otherwise expert in haulage contracts, but had been sent against the chance that these were Laurel’s graul. It proved that was the language these graul knew, though with many invented words. They had been lost to their journey with a child’s understanding and had had to establish their own metaphors.

  I would have rather had some other notice. Simiform graul are, by statistical expectation, between seventeen and nineteen decimetres tall. They have a grey cast of skin and dully dark grey hair of uneven shade and are, aside from minor details of eyes and dentition, superficially entirely human in ap
pearance. Those few graul I had previously met were skillful at presenting themselves as socially human, though simiform graul are not by their natures so.

  By statistical expectation, adult ophidiform graul are composed of two metres of head and neck, a two metre limb-segment where the lower pair of arms is larger and stronger than the upper, eight or nine metres of body segments, and six to eight metres of laterally compressed tail segments. The body segments are round in cross section and rarely an entire metre through, while the tail is compressed through its width to rise perhaps two metres at its highest. The limb-segment is wider than it is high and has the height of the body segments. Both pairs of limbs fold against and into the limb-segment so as to present no obstruction to undulating locomotion. The whole is armoured; youthful ophidiform graul have only the forward portion of the fish-shape armoured, but the adults are armoured for the whole of their length and their surface. The material is the same as the simiform graul tooth-analog, and I have watched the Captain bite through iron wire in preference to picking up pliers near at hand.

  These graul were abashed and concerned and very much socially uncertain. So well as we were able to establish, they had had no adult society which they recalled. Their journey had been undertaken when they had been ages that would be in Creeks between eight and ten years of age. They had had encounters with people along the way, and this was in large measure why they had not all survived. They were also, perhaps in consequence of their extended youth (estivation having been delayed until it was inescapable) and perhaps for cause of their marine diet throughout that youth, larger than than the usual run of ophidiform graul. All of them were about twenty-five metres in length rather than the expected twenty. It made for a great concentration of awkwardness, as we had all expected to meet graul from the First Commonweal. To those graul of our imaginations we would have had a known and comprehensible relation. Of these, there were many questions.